Guide gives Israel top marks

BASYA LAYE

Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2011 has just been released, offering the coming year’s “best trends, destinations, journeys and experiences.” Two of those top destinations are Tel Aviv, which placed third for best city, and the Sinai, which placed first for best region. Aside from their general appeal, both spots are considered to be close enough to Europe – and cheap enough – to attract weekend travelers looking to party by the sea or “top up their tans,” but far enough away to offer some diversity and exotic flavor.

Tel Aviv, the entry confirms, is “a truly diverse 21st-century Mediterranean hub. By far the most international city in Israel, Tel Aviv is also home to a large gay community, a kind of San Francisco in the Middle East. Thanks to its universities and museums, it is also the greenhouse for Israel’s growing art, film and music scenes.”

Calling the Sinai a “mighty desert peninsula,” it reminds travelers that this desertscape is “home to a mystical red-rock mountain range, said to have played a major role in the foundation of the three major monotheistic faiths.” Travelers are encouraged to check out the Red Sea’s coral reef and the peaceful ecolodges dotting the landscape between the Egyptian resort towns of Taba and Dahab.

The Tel Aviv and the Sinai entries were written by Dan Savery Raz, but it is author and journalist Amelia Thomas who has served as Lonely Planet’s Middle East expert for the past several years. Thomas spoke with the Independent, explaining how she got the coveted role at Lonely Planet and about her perspective on travel to Israel and the region.

Originally from England, Thomas worked as a journalist in Holland and then moved to Israel, writing, traveling and raising a family.

“I mostly did features, behind the news, the stories that people don’t hear about,” she said by telephone from her home on Bowen Island. “I was in a privileged position, in that I was able to see all the sides of the various conflicts in the Middle East. I was living in Israel for five years but also spent quite a lot of time in Lebanon and the West Bank, in Gaza and Egypt and Jordan, and got quite a good picture of the whole area. What interested me were the stories that you don’t hear on the CNN headlines, the real people who somehow have to continue with their lives and who make things work despite the fact that all this conflict is constantly going on, so I started doing that.”

In 2010, Lonely Planet published a new edition of the Israel/Palestinian Territories guide after a period of not covering the region due to the ongoing conflicts.

Lonely Plant was the first “the first guidebook to jump in and do a new guide,” Thomas explained. “Because I was living there and had done quite a lot of behind the scenes stuff, that’s how I ended up writing for them.... I do quite a few guides for them. I did quite a lot of guides to India, Lebanon [and] some of the more general ones, like Travel with Children, because I’ve got four little kids. I also continued doing journalism and I wrote a ‘real book’ … a narrative, non-fiction book about the region … called The Zoo on the Road to Nablus. It came out in 2008. It’s a true story about the last Palestinian zoo, this one zoo that managed in the territories to survive all the conflicts, and the head vet who … made very good friends with a Jewish-Israeli vet and, between them, they kept the zoo going throughout the conflict…. It’s like a microcosm of the whole problem, the whole conflict area.”

Thomas is coordinating author of the 2010 Israel/Palestinian Territories guidebook, and wrote the entries on history, culture, Tel Aviv, the West Bank and Gaza, among others. “It’s great that it’s continuing to be bought, that tourists are coming back to Israel and I think this year has been the biggest year for tourism ever. We like to think it’s partly because of the Lonely Planet,” she mused.

Accessibility and accuracy are key elements of any good guide, according to Thomas. “It was really important for us to make sure to make it very accessible, from the beginning … that [Israel]’s not a scary place; to be able to put into perspective the risks, so people wouldn’t be put off by thinking that there are [just] dangers and that terrorism is a threat. A lot of people have been put off the region by this image that they have of a war-torn place. Actually, life goes on. There’s a great many places you can go that are safe. I was in Tel Aviv when there was a war going on with Gaza and a war going on with Lebanon and everyone was just going out and sitting in cafés and getting on completely normally, even though it’s only 40-50 miles away. I think that was really important to us, to emphasize that cities go on; life goes on. We have, in the guidebook, a little bit of text about how to keep safe and make sure to take local advice and read up about it,” she noted.

To offer realistic expectations, Thomas said she attempts to balance perspectives and facts. “It’s a really fine balance, because you don’t want to scare people, but you do want to make people aware that there are risks…. It was a challenge.”

Thomas feels a responsibility to be sensitive to local economies, as well. “You have a responsibility as a writer not to highlight five places,” she clarified. “What happens is, people flock to those five places and the places next door, which are just as good, will be empty. It’s tricky … tourism is now booming but it wasn’t a few years ago. You want to make sure the wealth is shared. I think it’s really vital, especially in quite sensitive places in the world, so we can give recommendations which are valid, but we can also say, ‘Walk around this area, go to that street and you’ll find 10 places.’... It sometimes feels like it’s a very weighty thing to write the guidebook, especially because there aren’t many guides to this region. The majority of the travelers you see out on the road in Israel have got our guidebook.”

As a former Tel Aviv resident, Thomas doesn’t have enough good things to say about the city, where she and her half-Finnish/half-Israeli husband were raising their expanding family. “I love Tel Aviv – the range of things. I think that’s something that people don’t think about. When they think of Israel, they think of Jerusalem…. But they don’t realize that people go out for dinner in Tel Aviv at midnight and the Gay Pride Parade is immense and that there’s always something to do and that you can swim in the sea in October and, you know, I think more and more now, one of the big upswings in tourism is people coming from Europe, as an alternative weekend mini-break. Instead of flying to Madrid or Barcelona or Paris, the flight’s only a couple of hours longer and the budget airlines are flying to Tel Aviv now and you can come for the weekend. It’s just great. In another way, it opens the dialogue both ways, on a more socio-political level. The less isolated Israel is, the more understanding there is, that’s good for everybody.”

Thomas and her family left Israel last year, after the birth of their fourth child, resettling for the time being in British Columbia.

“There was a point at which I was having our third baby and there were lots of wars going on and I’d been covering lots of conflicts. We were in this beautiful, silent birthing suite and outside there were army helicopters flying to and fro, so it kind of spoiled this nice, serene moment…. We’d been [in Israel] for five years, I was working every day … our second, third and fourth children were all born in Israel, and I just said, ‘OK, enough! I need a break.’ Where is the most opposite place in the world to this? Where’s as green and wet and calm and quiet as this is dry and stressful? And I came up with Vancouver.”

Aside from being a fan of Tel Aviv, Thomas also has great affection for the Negev. “I think the Negev is a really underrated area. I did this couple of days of horse riding through the desert. You can pick prehistoric fossils off the ground and there’s a lot of alternative culture, in the same way that Tel Aviv has a lot of alternative culture, it’s moving to the Negev. There are these moshavim full of really creative people who have decided to create these alternative lifestyles and they’re experimenting with green energy and that’s where a lot of the high-tech progress is being made. Then there’s the opposite end of the country, the Golan, which is beautiful, with Crusader castles, and Amirim, which is a vegetarian moshav in the north, fantastic food and great people and you can get your cards read…. Although it’s a really small country and you can drive from one end to the other in a day, there’s so much packed into it,” she concluded. “It definitely takes time, even to slip into that way of life, that mentality takes a while. I think you could eat somewhere different every day for six months and have great food every single day. I miss the food.”

Thomas is working on her next book and will return to Israel on holiday with her family this January.

^TOP